Collaboratively Answering Australia’s Geoscience Questions.

Exploration Geoscience demonstrator

Leaders

Sponsors

Minerals Down Under Flagship Program at CSIRO, AuScope & the University of Queensland

Goals

Exploration Geosciences is the understanding of earth processes, and their influence on the spatial location and formation of earth resources such as mineral deposits, oil and gas, and geothermal energy sources. To be truly predictive about the location of new resources and understand their processes of formation (why is the gold there?) it is important to gain an quantitative understanding of the way physical processes interact and couple to produce the end result. The Reactive Transport (RT) code and its graphical user interface the Desktop Modelling Toolkit (DMT) is a simulation platform for coupled modelling of fluid-flow, heat and mass transport and chemical reaction in a fully integrated environment. The code was developed by CSIRO during the predictive Mineral Discovery CRC using the Fastflo solver but recently this has been ported to Escript with development through the CSIRO Minerals Down Under Flagship and Auscope. The code allows users to build and run complex 2/3D models of thermal-flow with chemical reactions solved using the Gibbs Minimisation approach in the WinGibbs solver (Hch by Shvarov&Bastrakov, 1999). Future developments will see the development of a single unified approach to solving the coupling between the physical processes and the feedbacks, including work within Minerals Down Under and the Western Australia Center of Excellence for Geothermal to couple mechanical processes through codes such as Abaqus. By understanding the coupled processes, and they way they evolve through feedback we can start to quantify the response that are needed in locating new earth resources.